Gadget Eye

Android Tester

Max Reviews

Nowadays, there are several ways to watch content on your TV if you don’t like using a set-top box. Smart TVs are one way to go, but they do have some downsides. For one, you’re stuck with whatever software that comes with the TV, so you can’t pick the platform you like best or that’s most compatible with your devices. Then there’s also the fact that the software on your smart TV will probably become outdated much sooner than the actual hardware will, so you’re left with the prospect of buying an expensive new television just to get more up-to-date software.

Smartphone tech has come a long way over the last ten years, but a few commonly requested features are still lacking. Battery life can’t be measured in weeks yet, Android still doesn’t have a decent iMessage competitor, and there aren’t any first-party cross-platform notification mirroring services. Some of our desires might not be reasonable, but others are. And, at least in the case of notification synchronization, there are plenty of third-party services that can fill the gap.

Amazon announced earlier this week that lockscreen ads won’t be present on newly-purchased Prime Exclusive devices and an update is rolling out to the Amazon Offers app to disable them on existing handsets. If you don’t want to wait, you can sideload that update right now.

Amazon’s Prime Exclusive Phones program has been a great way to grab an Android device on the cheap since its introduction in 2016, but the discount has always come with some compromise: a locked bootloader, Amazon-flavored bloatware, and—perhaps most annoyingly—ads on your lockscreen.

Getty Images and Google are announcing an agreement for a multi-year licensing partnership, allowing Google to use Getty’s images in Search and across its other products. The agreement requires that Google make some changes to Image Search, including making copyright disclaimers more prominent and removing direct links to certain images.

The partnership comes in the sequence of a law complaint filed by Getty against Google back in April 2016, accusing Google of anti-competitive practices by promoting its own products and displaying high resolution images in Search, thereby reducing the need for users to visit the original source website.

There’s a new version of Android Messages rolling out to our phones. So far, we haven’t seen any significant changes to the UI, but huge things are happening under the surface. A teardown reveals Google is getting ready to launch a web interface that would allow users to pair their phones with a computer for all of their texting needs. Google may also be planning to offer its own enhanced chat features to work with RCS messaging.

Samsung’s Gear watches have gone from a an opportunity to joke about wrist cameras to a pretty solid wearable option. They’re just a little expensive most of the time. You can, however, get a big discount on the Gear S3 Frontier today at Best Buy. It’s a refurbished device, but it’s hard to complain at $ 210.

The Gear S3 Frontier is a slightly larger, heavier version of the Gear S3. It has a more rugged look with a thick rubber strap.

Anker only recently moved into the competitive Bluetooth headphone space. Last year the company created a very successful Kickstarter for its Liberty+ headphones, and now those of us unlucky enough to miss out on that early bird pricing can get in on the action, too. Both the Liberty+ and Liberty are now discounted on Amazon via coupon codes, for a mere $ 79 and $ 119, respectively.

We haven’t reviewed the smaller Liberty headphones, but Anker’s ZOLO Liberty+ are among our recent favorites.

Back in December, we made a surprising discovery: if you had Ok Google detection enabled on your Android Wear watch, it could cause a lot of lag and jittery behavior all the time. Disabling the setting completely turned the behavior around and made it so that the watch was smooth and stutter-free. I recorded a video back then to show the night and day difference and many of you chimed in reporting that disabling the detection had the same beneficial effects on your watch as well.

Every week, I examine somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred app updates while looking for changes. The most interesting things turn into APK Teardowns or Download posts. Many of the remaining updates are unremarkable, amounting to a few bug fixes, routine updates to libraries, or even just pixel-level adjustments to layouts and images. However, there are usually a few updates that land somewhere in between. I don’t want to spam readers with dozens of short posts, but I hate to ignore things that people might want to know about, so I’m going to wrap up the leftovers for a little weekend reading and call it Update Notes.